Do happy people have less effect on their health from stress than unhappy people?

We all know that stress has an adverse of your health. Stress affects us in different ways depending on numerous factors, particularly how happy we are.

This is not to say that happy people have less stress—everybody has stress.

Studies have shown, though, that people generally identifying as happy do not suffer from the ill effects of stress as much as those generally identifying as unhappy.

One study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in England, included researchers looking at levels of a stress hormone known as cortisol and a marker of inflammation named fibrinogen. Fibrinogen can be elevated when the harmful substances of breakdown aren’t balance by the healing substances of repair.

In this study, levels of cortisol were 32% lower in people who reported more happy moments. You might expect that people who were happy more often would also have lower levels of fibrinogen in their blood, and this indeed was the case.

The surprising results on the fibrinogen testing, however, came when fibrinogen levels during stress were measured. These results demonstrated that happy people had lower levels of fibrinogen even when under psychological stress.

In other words, stress appeared to have less of a physical effect on people who were happier.

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